Your Perfect Year(84)
They were assuming that he had drowned, had taken his life in the ice-cold water—as suggested not only by his final letter, but also the fact that initial investigations showed no sign of third-party interference—but Hannah’s personal contact had told her they wanted to carry out a postmortem to be absolutely sure. There had been no eyewitnesses to attest to suicide, so all the indicators needed to be substantiated with hard facts.
Hannah no longer needed this certainty. She had known deep down in her heart all along, even if she hadn’t wanted to believe it. On that New Year’s morning when she had been sleeping, blissfully unaware in his bed, and woken still believing that she had reached him with her diary, had succeeded in giving him new hope—on that very morning, he had killed himself. He had made a solitary decision, had left Hannah behind, not even given her a final chance to talk to him about it and try to find a solution together, opting instead for the ultimate, final escape route.
She sat in Simon’s kitchen, on one of his Eames chairs, feeling like a block of stone. She had sent Lisa home an hour ago, after her friend had spent the first half of the night with her at the police station and the second half in Simon’s apartment. Lisa had been at a loss. Speechless. Apart from her usual “I’m sorry,” all words had failed her. But what could anyone say? Except that they were truly sorry.
About Simon. About Hannah. About all that could have been and now would never again be possible. Over. Finished. Forever.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own? I’ll call your parents if you like,” Lisa had said after Hannah asked her to leave because she wanted space to dwell on her thoughts.
“I don’t want to see anyone. But it would be really nice if you could ring Mama and Papa and tell them what’s happened. I’m just not up to it right now,” she had replied, surprising herself at how calm she sounded. Even at the police station she’d been unnaturally self-controlled, as if in a trance or under the strongest medication. The collapse she and everyone else had expected never came; she was in a state of shock. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll manage. And you need to take care of things at Little Rascals later.”
“Don’t you even think about that! It’s not important right now.”
“Yes, it is. It’s the only thing I have left. As soon as I’m feeling a bit better, I’ll be back. Just give me a few days.”
“Take all the time in the world. I’m there and I can hold the fort, with the help of our mothers.”
“What for?” she had asked. “What do I need all the time in the world for? To sit around here and think about how Simon’s really dead? That he’s really, truly never coming back? That I’ll never again be able to hug him or kiss him, that none of that will ever, ever, ever happen again?” Then, finally, the release came in the form of tears that fell in torrents. Hannah had sobbed so violently and so loudly that her whole body shook.
“Shhh!” Lisa had taken her in her arms and gently rocked her. “It’ll be okay, darling. It’ll be fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine, and nothing would ever be fine again. Hannah knew it with brutal clarity as she sat alone in Simon’s kitchen. She suddenly felt out of place, here in a dead man’s apartment.
What was she doing here? These weren’t her belongings that surrounded her, and their owner didn’t need them anymore. Not his beloved Eames chairs, not his high-tech Italian espresso machine, not the dishes and cutlery in the cupboards or the stupid stoneware mug with Chef on it, not the clothes that were still in the dryer, not the rows of books on the living-room shelves, not the racing bike that hung on the wall in the hallway, and not even his dreadful Birkenstock slippers which, when she first saw them on his feet, Hannah had said would be legitimate grounds for divorce.
He needed none of it, nothing, nothing, nothing anymore. They were only things! Dead, lifeless things, completely useless without the man they had belonged to.
Hannah sprang up from the kitchen chair and wandered restlessly through the apartment. After the tears came the anger. The raging, immeasurable anger with Simon for being such a coward.
Coward, coward, coward!
Suicide was such a thoughtless, spineless solution! To throw it all away without sparing a single thought for those you left behind. Simply to pull the plug and après moi le déluge—it was so egotistical, so mean, so . . . so absolutely inhuman! Yes, it was easy for the departed, it was all the same to him afterward, he didn’t feel anything. Let the rest figure out their own way to get through it, to rebuild the ruins, to somehow find their way back to life and carry on.
Bang! With a violent swing of her arm, Hannah swept the espresso machine from the counter. It landed on the kitchen floor with a crash, breaking two tiles. It felt good. Very good.
She tore open the cabinet doors and swept everything from the shelves, watching as plates, cups, and glasses fell and smashed. With every item that shattered she felt the hairline cracks of her heart tear apart too. They were followed by packets and jars of pasta, jam, tea, sugar, salt, flour; she violently flung it all to the floor, until the kitchen looked like a battlefield.
Continuing her work in the living room, she overturned the TV, hurled a vase together with its flowers from the table, tore pictures from the walls and smashed them against a corner of the windowsill, dragged all the curtains from their rods and sent the CD collection flying.